Tag: SlideRocket

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I use SlideRocket to prepare presentations for conferences. I got an invite to the beta product in its early days, and I was so impressed I willingly stayed with it when it came out of Beta and eventually decided to pay for a pro account at a cost of $240 US dollars a year.

Many out there would baulk at paying for presentation software, but there are definite advantages to using SlideRocket from my point of view. Probably the most useful feature for me is the ability to search flickr for creative commons images from within the software. For me, using creative commons images is a must; you need to practice what you preach. People viewing my presentation online can hover over the image and the attribution for the person who took the shot is visible. I’d prefer it if a link was provided as well, as this would take people to the creator’s work. They now enable you to search for YouTube videos from within the software, and this is something else I’ve found to be very useful. What’s incredibly insightful is the access you have to the analytics of your presentations. I publish my presentations online in public spaces, and the analytics enable me to know when a presentation has been viewed, how long it was looked at, and what city and country the person looking at it originated from. It’s fascinating, especially when I have seen my work being used rather extensively in university environments around the world.

Are you wondering yet why I’m offering SlideRocket my thanks?

On January 5th, I was watching the twitter stream pass me by, when I saw tweets from the SlideRocket team being sent out to people who have scored a gig to present at the SXSW Conference. They were offering them access to a free pro account to put their presentations together. Being the forward person that I am, I thought I’d be a bit cheeky and send them a tweet.

I really didn’t expect a reply, but I got one. @SlideRocket asked me to send them an email with my request so I did. Lo and behold, the very helpful Sogol listened and organised for me to receive 6 months free access to a pro account. I was looking at renewing my subscription at the end of this month, but now I won’t need to until August.

So, there you go. Nothing ventured, nothing gained as my Mother would say.

I mentioned in my previous post that my school (Toorak College) is participating as a pilot school in the Allanah and Madeline foundation’s Esmart initiative. As a 1:1 laptop school from Grade 5 onwards, we recognise the responsibility we have to help our students understand how to use the Internet responsibly.

I created this presentation (which unfortunately, won’t embed here -you’ll need to follow the link) for the year 5 and 6 students and delivered it today. I was really pleased with the students’ interest in what I was saying and the vast array of questions they posed about their online activities. At the end of the presentation, one of their teachers asked were any of them going home to make some changes to their online profiles. Quite a few of them raised their hands. Our discussion centered on the content of these slides, but was also peppered with discussion about the positive uses of the web for learning and communication. We were interested in supporting these students in their use of social networking sites; quite a few of them are using them already. I think the messages in the slides will be appropriate for our Yr 7 and 8 students as well.

Once again, I used Sliderocket to create the presentation. I really do love the fact that you are able to search Flickr Creative Commons pictures from within SlideRocket and import them into your presentation. In past presentations, the attribution appeared at the bottom of the slide. Now they appear when you hover over the picture. The Internet safety advice was largely drawn from the Australian Government site, ACMA Cybersmart.

We are aiming to run sessions right through the school, from Grade 3 onwards. Looks like I might be making some good use of that SlideRocket account!

I’ve been extolling the virtues of SlideRocketfor some time now. For the past year and a bit I’ve been using this online presentation tool and I’ve been really impressed with what you can do with it. But I know I’m still no expert. There are plenty of features I haven’t found time to explore yet.

Last week I embedded a presentation I gave about Ning onto a wikispace site I have and this blog. Since then a couple of other people have embedded it into sites they have too. I made the presentation for public viewing and allowed for the code to be embedded should people want to use it. The other day I remembered that you could view the statistics for your presentation. In other words, you could see how many times it had been viewed and by how many people. Here’s a screenshot of what I discovered;

Now that is pretty cool. First up, 386 views by 156 different people demonstrates the reach you can have by sharing what you do. Secondly, I am blown away by the fact that I can pull up details of the location of where those people are who have been viewing the slides. I’d be interested to know who the person is from Newport Beach is California who spent 15 mins with them today!

I used this data today at my school to sway our Tech committee around to the idea of getting a school site subscription to SlideRocket. They are offering schools with under 1000 students a site licence for $449.00 US Dollars. My argument was that we need to be exposing our kids to the kinds of tools they may find when they hit the world of work. They certainly need to understand that the social nature of tools like SlideRocket add to your understanding of networking and how this kind of sharing can have positive side effects. The message was well received and I am hopeful that we may see our school population exploring this tool next year.

I’ve been using SlideRocket, an online presentation tool, for the past year for presentations I have given at conferences. To start with, I badgered them for an invite to use the product before it’s release. To my surprise, they obliged. I then moved over to the free version when it had general release, but felt it was limited so had to sign up for the premium version. Around that time SlideRocket sent me a survey asking my opinion about pricing for K-12 education. My response was that they needed to make it affordable, under $500.00 for a site licence. To be honest with you I didn’t think it was anywhere near possible as I’d just had my school sign up for the one user premium package at a price of $240.00 a year.

I was surprised last week to get an email from SlideRocket letting me know that they were going to be announcing pricing for education. When I looked at what they were offering I was very pleasantly surprised. Here it is;

Schools with less then one hundred and fifty students will pay $249 per year, schools with less than one thousand students will pay $449 per year and schools with over one thousand students will pay $999 per year. All pricing is per school allowing every member of the school community – teachers and students alike – to create his or her own SlideRocket login and gain access to SlideRocket’s premium features.

In my opinion, that pricing is pretty good given the features SlideRocket offers. I found my last couple of presentations pretty easy to put together. I was able to access flickr creative commons attribution only pictures from within the SlideRocket application and load them easily into my presentation. I could create a library of my slides so that I can use them easily in new presentations should I need them. My presentations are stored online so I could access them from any computer anywhere provided I had an internet connection. They also allow you to download an offline player allowing you to cache your presentation should internet access be a problem.

There are other features I’ve yet to explore that hold real potential in educational settings. You can work collaboratively on a presentation and access a shared library of resources with the SlideRocket community. The pricing is wonderful for a school my size (under 1000). $449 US dollars converts to $568 Australian dollars. Less than one dollar each for students and staff for use of a premium package is pretty good value.

Now, to lobby for it to go into next year’s budget…..

(If you want to see Sliderocket in action visit my wikispaces site where my presentations are embedded.)

It was well received and, as is usual for me, I didn’t manage to get through all of the presentation as I have a tendancy to elaborate. It’s very difficult to relay the concept of learning communities and all that goes with the formation of them in an hour. I fielded questions along the way but didn’t get discussion time factored in. If anyone would like further elaboration on anything in the presentation leave a comment and I’ll do my best to address what it is you need to know.

I posted recently about how I was reworking a presentation using Garr Reynold’s principles and SlideRocket’s cool effects. That presentation was Saturday but the presentation didn’t make it to the audience. I had to rely on my previous PowerPoint – nowhere near the quality of what is embedded here (IMHO).

The presentation was completed but I couldn’t cache it. I sat up until after 1.00am trying and eventually sought the help of the network. I put out a tweet asking if anyone knew anyone from SlideRocket who could give me advice. Angela Maiers replied and said that SlideRocket had an account on Twitter and that I should direct message them. I found them on Twitter and did just that. Had to get some sleep so got up at 6.30 and checked Twitter. Sure enough, direct message from SlideRocket telling me that I needed to download the latest version of their offline client. Did that but still had trouble caching. DM’d again and let them know. When I returned home from the presentation there was a DM from SlideRocket saying they have reported the bug and will be trying to remedy it.

I’m letting you know what happened because I think it’s a fantastic example of how great the network is. I’m in Melbourne, Australia, Angela Maiers is in Des Moines, Iowa and SlideRocket’s offices are in San Francisco. I find it really cool to be able to send out a call for help and halfway around the world my tiny voice is heard and answered within a few hours. I explained all this to my audience this morning and I think a lot of them were pretty impressed, or maybe they were wondering just what it was I was taking about!

Despite my problems I’m still loving SlideRocket and don’t begrudge the time I spent putting the presentation together. Someone, somewhere might want me to do it again (!) and I learnt more about the app as I was using it. As always, you always learn best when you have a need to learn – good lesson for us all as educators to remember. The presentation is visual – very little text so probably a bit hard to follow if you’re not listening to me speak about the process I went through in learning about and initiating digital stories to complement our literature circle studies. The videos students produced are embedded in the presentation and take a while to load- if you want to see them (and they’re there warts and all!) you will have to be patient. Just a note- there is one there that was a response to the essential question, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ There are quite a few images of 9/11 – if you haven’t seen the footage for some time the images can be quite confronting. Interestingly enough, these students were in Grade 4 when 9/11 happened. It obviously had quite an impact on their lives.

**thanks very much to Nat and the staff from SlideRocket – I had trouble getting the presentation to play here and they have been in constant contact helping me to sort things out. Didn’t know such service was possible today – they have been amazing.

I’ve spent tonight putting together a presentation I have to give on Saturday for a group of Teacher-Librarians. It’s about the experiences I have had with Literature Circles and Digital Storytelling. I presented at last year’s ASLA conference in Adelaide and have been asked to give that presentation for the Melbourne audience I’ll be speaking to.

Things have changed for me in terms of presentation style since Adelaide. I’ve become a convert of Garr Reynold’s approaches to presentation and as a result have spent some time reworking the slides so that it is visual rather than text driven with bullet points. I’ve also had access to SlideRocket so have reworked the presentation using this new application. (Reading their blog suggests that the public beta release may be soon!)

SlideRocketcontinues to impress me. I’m loving what you can do with images. When you insert a picture you can upload from your computer or can select to upload from Flickr or Yahoo. If you choose Flickr you can select to use creative commons pictures. The pictures to select from load from within SlideRocket – far easier than moving out of the application to Flickr itself. You can easily scroll through options. When you find what you want you double click on the picture and it uploads to your slide. When you hover your mouse over the image the photo credit details appear. Brilliant! Acknowledgement for the creators is immediately apparant.

Each time I use it I discover more cool features. It doesn’t support wmv files so I’ve had to convert the files i’m using to flv format. I did this by uploading them to YouTube and then saving them as an flv using keepvid. Zamzar probably would have been faster, but i’ve never uploaded to YouTube before so have learnt something that will be useful in the process. Now when I get students to upload I’ll know what I’m doing. Always an asset to look knowledgeable!

When I’ve finished I’ll upload the presentation here so you can take a look. Not tonight – getting very late again!!

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Jenny Luca writes about…

the important job that is teaching, and how to incorporate new technologies into our practice. Considering she is a Teacher-Librarian, there's a fair bit of discussion about libraries here as well. She tries to inject a bit of humour into the mix every now and then too. She thinks it's important.

Blog main picture

Text projections by public artist Martin Firrell onto the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, London. Commissioned by Dean and Chapter to mark the 300th anniversary of the topping out of Sir Christopher Wren's cathedral building. Titled 'The Question Mark Inside' the artwork presented a stream of answers to the question, what makes life meaningful and purposeful?